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New years is here, and with it brings the possibility of change.

As one behavioral scientist put it, first starts are really powerful.

So as you head into 2023, LifeKit is a great resource to help you plan your life and tackle changes, both big and small.

Listen to the LifeKit podcast from NPR.

Okay, so at some point in the past decade, you or someone you know probably owned a simple pair of cloth shoes, and there's a good chance those shoes may have been Tom's.

Because in the past decade, Blake Mikoski built a multi-million dollar shoe empire, inspired by a simple cloth shoe he once saw in Argentina.

But Blake's journey to shoes took a lot of detours.

This story first ran in 2017. Enjoy.

Well, I kind of freaked out.

And I got this small army of interns to help basically be customer service to email and call all these people.

Let them know that there was no chance that they were going to get their shoes in the four days or five days of the website.

I promised it was going to be more like a couple months. And I literally, fruit of Buenos Aires took a taxi to this guy's house, Juan Torres, who was making the shoes in his garage for us at the time.

And I walked in and with the little Spanish eye knew I said something like, Muchos Zapatos Rapido.

From NPR, it's how I built this. A show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements they built.

I'm Guy Ross and on today's show, how Blake Mikoski turned a good will mission into a multi-million dollar shoe empire and created a business model unlike anything anyone had seen before.

So I should probably let you know right at the outset here that today's show is going to be a little bit different because normally in the first half of the show, we hear the story of how an entrepreneur painstakingly builds his or her business from the ground up.

And then you know how it goes from there right and normally it's just one business. But with Blake Mikoski, it is not just one because before he even turned 30, he'd already launched four companies and some of them did pretty well.

And as for his best known business, Tom Shoes, we're not even going to get there for a while. So hang tight. Blake's very first business dates back to the mid-1990s when he was a freshman in college.

Growing up, he'd been a pretty good tennis player. He even played against Andy Roddick in high school. And Blake was recruited to play at Southern Methodist University. And everything was going according to plan.

That is until one day when he injured his Achilles tendon.

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